


Only Forever

by MoonAndPomegranate



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-02-05
Updated: 2014-02-11
Packaged: 2018-01-11 06:37:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,029
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1169855
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MoonAndPomegranate/pseuds/MoonAndPomegranate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lydia was a good citizen. She and her mother reported her hallucinations and blackouts to the local hunters as soon as it seemed like the supernatural was involved. She did as she was told and for her efforts she was locked away, used for experiments, starved, and tortured. When they finally decide to dispose of her, they lock a feral alpha in her cell.<br/>But whatever Peter lacks in humanity after years with the Argents, he won't kill his own. And Lydia is most certainly his.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Just a snippet that came to me, I have no idea if this is going anywhere or where it might go.

Lydia was cold. No matter where they took her, it was always cold here.

"We don't know what's wrong with her," her mother had said.

"It's best we keep her under observation for a few days," Gerard Argent had replied, kindly, comforting. He was a hunter, with federal and state certification. You can trust the hunters, they always said, they'll protect you.

That was two months ago, by Lydia's count. But it was also dark, very dark, in the cell where they kept her, so she might have lost track. And she used to think she was good with numbers.

Yesterday, she had sat on the concrete floor all day, alternating between trying to remember the full text of her favorite Emily Dickinson poems and doing jumping jacks to try and stay warm. There were four solid walls around her and one metal door. She got two cold meals a day. The fluorescent light above her flickered on and off at random intervals. She never heard anything from outside the cell. Maybe she was alone in this prison. Maybe the walls were very thick.

When they tortured her, she used to scream loud and hard. She hoped there were others in the cells that could hear her. It was selfish, but she wanted someone besides the dull-faced, cruel-eyed hunters to hear her. Sometimes they kept her awake for days, blasting loud noises in her ears, flashed lights in her eyes. They played with electricity, one day giving her short zaps for hours, on another, huge doses all at once, so she'd pass out and wake up with her urine drying cold down her legs.

Before, at home, there had been strange premonitions, flashes of images and sounds, nightmares, blackouts. Red eyes in the night. A bite on her hip that disappeared before she could show it to anyone else. A voice and a growl. The smell of aconite. She had missed school, woken up naked in the woods, seen things. All the symptoms had stopped once the hunters had her.

Lydia wondered if she had been misdiagnosed. She had never had any magic, she had just been plain old crazy. And now she would rot away in a cold concrete room, alone and forgotten. She wondered if her mother would have taken her to one of those fancy mental hospitals, with horseback riding and yoga classes. She spent a few minutes with her eyes closed and tried to imagine, in minute sensory detail, the feeling of lying in a hospital bed - the smell of bleach, the clean sheets against bare feet, perhaps even the warm haze of a sedative.

But that wasn't right. The symptoms had not completely gone away, here. They had changed, in fact, under the hunters' ministrations. Before they had been violent and terrifying, taking her mind and body hostage, when she least expected it. Now she knew when the hallucinations would start - just when the pain or exhaustion or humiliation became too much to bear.

That's when the voice, disembodied, would start in her ear. A man's voice. No one else seemed to her hear him, but then, he only ever spoke to her.

Today, they were testing metals on her, cutting her first with silver, then iron, then copper, then bronze, rubbing aconite and mountain ash into each cut. They gag her every time now. At first, she had tried to protest that there had been a mistake, that she wasn't supposed to be here.

And then she had moved on to discussing, between screams, the history of prisoner's rights - the 19th century reforms that banned corporal punishment, the Geneva convention. That was when they brought out the thick rubber bits. Lydia didn't mind them. They muffled her screaming and prevented her from gnashing at her own lips and tongue.

She was cuffed to a metal grate, which she knew they could electrify at any moment, so she tried not to thrash or kick. They pulled on another cut on her arm, packing it with rough herbs. She sunk her teeth into the gag and the voice said, "Shh, it's alright. It's alright, Lydia." It was inside her head and in her ear and coming from the four corners of the room, echoing and multiplying.

"Be strong, be strong for me. You'll be alright." She closed her eyes and tried to listen for more.

One of the hunters working on her cuts was a woman. The women were always harsher, more detached and methodical. The men used to grope at her flesh, laugh at her squeals and whimpers, but she'd lost too much weight, she supposed, to be very interesting to them.

"One day," the voice said, "I'll kill all of them. Anyone who's ever touched you, Lydia, I swear it. I'll return the pain they gave you a thousand times before I strangle them with my bare hands so I can watch the life fade from their faces."

The voices had always been violent, even before. They would threaten her friends, her family, Lydia herself. But here, they defended her, snarled at her tormentors, soothed her pain. Lydia had no choice - there was no other solace to be found anymore. She let the voice drown out the pain as best she could. Sometimes, when she concentrated hard enough, it felt almost like relief.

"She's no fun anymore," one said to another, "She always closing her eyes and just taking it."

Lydia wondered if that meant they would kill her now.

"Take her back," was the reply from the woman and Lydia did not know if she was relieved.

"That'll liven things up," the first hunter said, removing Lydia's arms and legs from the grate and attaching a lead to her cuffs.

She did not process what they said, really, which is why she stood at the doorway of her cell in shock when they returned her. There was a man crouched in the far corner, where the light never touched. The hunters pushed at her and she fell forward. The door was banged shut behind her as she hit the ground.

The man in the corner growled. Of course. There was a werewolf in her cell. A real, deadly werewolf, with fangs and claws, not just Lydia, who seemed to be cursed with nothing more than a supernaturally bad clerical error.

Lydia lay there, face down, and waited. They had grown tired of her after all. They just had their own execution methods here. It didn't feel real, that she would die in this cold cage, cut off from everything she had ever known. Perhaps the shock of pain was getting to her, dissociating her reality from the monster approaching her prone body. How could she die, now, when she didn't even know what day it was? She didn't start crying, which surprised her. She cried an awful lot, these days, but now, when it counted, she just held still, cold and quiet as the concrete beneath her.

The werewolf's heavy breathing grew louder until she felt his breath on the back of her neck. She braced herself for another onslaught of pain. If she was lucky, that voice would soothe her to rest as she was torn limb from limb. Wouldn't that be nice?

And then she felt a tongue, wet and warm, lap at her arm. And again. And again. She tried her best to lay utterly still as the werewolf's head butted against her elbow. He was licking long stripes with the flat of his tongue, so that she could feel the sharp, elongated incisors scrape against her skin. His hair was soft where it brushed again her shoulder as he changed angles. He lapped at the inside of her forearm and, to her horror, it tickled. She fought against the instinct to squirm as the wolf continued to lick at her wrist and hand.

"What are you doing?" she hissed, finally turning onto her back, "Stop!"

She froze when she saw the wolf. He was dirty, his black hair long and disheveled. He had the red eyes of an alpha. An alpha, like the one she would see in her dreams. His face was shifted, forehead thick and jaw covered in hair.

She raised her hand to touch his lips. They were blistering in front of her eyes, raw and burnt. She looked down at the mess of her arm - the blood and the herbs smeared across her pale skin where the wolf's tongue had been. He had been trying to clean her wounds, burning his own lips and tongue on the magical plants in her cuts.

"Oh," she said, looking at him again, "Oh."

She scrambled backwards, until her back hit the wall. The werewolf followed her, crawling on all fours. He kept his face close to hers, kept looking back at her eyes as he sniffed around her neck and ratted hair.

"Hello," she said. He pressed his nose into her shoulder.

"I'm sorry," she tried again, "Do I know you?"

He shook his head.

"Can you understand me?"

He looked up again, his eyes mournful and urgent.

"If you can understand me, nod your head," she said.

He shook his head again.

Lydia sighed. "They've driven you insane, too, then."

But he seemed to pose no threat to her. The alpha only crouched before her and watched her carefully. She let her head hang forward, exhaustion catching up with her. Her arms ached dully, her muscles were sore, and her knees were bruised from being thrown to the floor.

So she crawled to her blanket in the corner and pulled it over herself, curling up to face the wall. She tried not to feel the weight of the wolf’s stare on her back.

“If you’re going to kill me, can you wait until I’m asleep?” she asked.

He gave a sort of sneezing noise at that, soft and confused. She watched the darkness in front of her for a minute before she felt him at her back. She froze, her muscles locked. He had significant bulk, which was surprising. His matted hair and ragged clothes made it seem as if he had been imprisoned for a long time, but the arm he curled over her shoulder was large and heavy. He buried his face in her neck, licked at her a little. His legs were pressed against the backs of her thighs. His skin was hot.

Lydia was too tired for fear. She let the warmth seep into her skin from his skin and she let herself relax into it. Somehow, as she fell further into sleep, she thought she felt the pain lessening in her arms. She supposed it was the relief of heat, after so long in the cold.


	2. Chapter 2

Lydia must have been sleeping deeply, because it was the werewolf’s snarls that woke her, not the clanging of her door unlocking. The bulb overhead was on, buzzing and dim, casting long shadows across the floor of her cell. A hunter had entered the room, the woman from her session yesterday, her gun drawn and pointed at the floor. The alpha pulled himself up and faced the door, his body between the hunter and Lydia.

They had left her to be killed last night. The plan had failed, obviously. Lydia felt whole and well rested. She had slept better than she had for weeks, in fact. So now they had come to execute her, cold and quick.

There was a certain detachment in watching the wolf and the hunter face off in front of her. It was interesting. Neither of them had a particular investment in her. The wolf wasn’t even human enough to speak and whatever had kept him from killing her the night before surely wouldn’t extend to taking a bullet for her. The hunters hadn’t had many results in their experiments on her, but they hadn’t even cared enough to murder her outright, until now.

Her mother used to call her “little princess”. She would tell Lydia that the world was hers, if she wanted it.

“You do _anything_ , little princess, anything,” she would tell her, before she left for school in the morning, before her chess tournaments, before ice skating lessons.

So maybe Lydia had an inflated sense of self-importance, before, but there was still something sad, that at that moment her life depended on which of these parties cared less about her.

The hunter moved to the left and the alpha followed, growling.

“C’mon,” the hunter said, “Move, you idiot.”

She lifted the gun, pointed it at the wolf’s chest. “Move!”

He did not and the shot exploded so loudly in her tiny cell that Lydia’s ears felt split in pain. The wolf did not move from above her. In fact, he shifted back, closer to where Lydia cowered against the wall.

The hunter said something that Lydia couldn’t hear over the ringing in her ears. Two more shots tore through the air. Lydia watched the alpha’s body take the hits and then heard the bullets hit the concrete behind her.

The wolf was roaring in fury and even if Lydia couldn’t quite hear it, she could feel the vibrations in the air, making her hair stand on end. She hid her face in her knees, waiting for the wolf to be subdued and the hunter to come for her. Another shot rang out and another after that.

After the hunter had emptied her clip into the wolf without moving him an inch, there was a long silence in the cell. The wolf was breathing hard and growling low.

“Seriously?” the woman asked, disbelieving. Lydia listened to her leave, listened to the door lock behind her, listened to the wolf collapse beside her. Only then did she lift her head.

“Why did you do that?” she whispered, crawling over to where he lay, “Why would you do that?”

But the pale skin of his torso had already reformed over the bullet wounds, clearly visible through the holes in his ragged, colorless shirt. His red eyes were looking up at her.

“She’s right,” Lydia continued, “You’re stupid. You can’t...you can’t protect me here…”

And that was when the tears came. Lydia felt them burning her eyes and then cold down her cheeks. Her shoulders heaved and then she was sobbing, collapsing against the wolf and letting out the fear and the rage. She slammed a fist against his chest.

“Why would you do that?” she asked again, but when she raised her hand to hit him again, he grabbed at it and held on tight. She did not resist as he put her arm back against her side nor when he sat up so that her head was resting in his lap, nor when her let a clawed hand rest on her hair.

She felt so empty, like a doll or a puppet. There was nothing left inside her head, just the ringing of the gunshots, so she let the wolf pet her head as her breathing slowed and her panic subsided. It seemed a remarkably human gesture for so animal a creature.

She asked, “You still can’t understand me, can you?”

There was no reply, so she kept talking.

“I don’t think you understand anything right now. If you did, you’d know they’re just going to come back with wolfsbane or a chainsaw and kill you before they kill me. It’s going to be a mess.”

The wolf cupped the back of her head and she leaned back against his hand.

“You seem awfully tame, for a big bad wolf. Not the best choice for an executioner, on their part.”

She burrowed further into his thigh. This was the first touch she had felt since she hugged her mother goodbye that had no intention of harm. She did not care that that the fabric of his pants smelled like something dead nor that his claws occasionally caught on her scalp.

“Not that I’m not grateful, for the saving and the defending. It’s just...what’s the point?”

She turned to look up at him. His mouth was open to show his fangs, his eyes trained on her, but uncomprehending. She let out a long sigh.

“You must have had a name, before all this. I wish I knew your name.”

The hours dragged on with her speaking sad nonsense to the wolf. They remained touching to keep warm or, rather, to keep Lydia warm. The alpha’s body was like a furnace, almost too hot to the touch and he likely didn’t notice the dank chill that pervaded the prison.

Lydia drank from the spigot on the wall, from which cold water occasionally chose to trickle. As always, it did not matter whether the tap was turned on or off, the freezing water just started and stopped at random intervals. Lydia washed her cuts from the day before properly, letting the dirt and blood wash down the drain at the center of the room. She drank and the alpha lapped at the stream too, on his hands and knees, unselfconscious.

No one brought her food that day. It was possible, Lydia realized with growing certainty and horror, that they planned to literally leave her to rot here. Perhaps they even meant to drive the alpha to kill and eat her from starvation. It was wholly possible.

She fell asleep a few long hours later, crying again and, remarkably, ashamed of it. She was not ashamed of much in front of her captors, who treated her like an animal anyway. She felt nothing nothing towards them, not anger nor hatred nor humiliation. But here was this beast, strong beyond measure. It was fierce and unafraid, if only because it couldn’t understand the mortal danger they were in. It had chosen to protect her and here she was dying of hunger anyway. She had resigned herself to death, many times over, in this prison, but she did not want to die in front of this wolf. It was a sudden strong, burning desire: she did not want this creature to watch her die. She only sobbed harder. What was the use of wanting? What control did she have over her own death?

The wolf held her to himself so closely it was almost brutal and he licked at her tears. Her little dog at home used to do that - it was the salt that made the tears taste good.

Her last thought was of her dog before she fell into long hours of red dreams, like scarlet silk threads tangled all through her head. She woke fitfully, aware of the hard, cold floor first, then the pang of hunger, then the heat at her back, then the wolf’s hair against the back of her neck. Then her stomach cramped and she woke fully, curling an arm around her middle.

“God, I’m so hungry.”

“I know. I’m sorry,” came the voice from behind her

Her head shot up, checking his chin. She winced and held her hand to the spot she had bumped.

“I’m sorry, did you just say something?”

She sat up and looked at him. His face had shifted back to human. It was a lovely human face, actually, with sharp planes and pale eyes.

“Hello, Lydia.”

And it was that voice. She knew that voice. She had been hearing it for months, in nightmares, waking dreams, visions, and hallucinations. His was the voice in her head..

“I know you,” she said.

“Of course you do. I’m your alpha.”

Her heart skipped a beat. “You...you did this to me? I’m in here because of you?”

He ducked his head. “Yes. Because of me. I’m sorry, truly.”

“Sorry? You _bit_ me. I thought I was going insane. I turned myself in. In here. You did this to me.”

He sighed and crossed his legs, sitting directly across from her. His eyes glinted as he angled his head, not the red of an alpha, but with the glitter of cold intelligence. “Would you believe me if I told you I wasn’t...myself? When I did it?”

She narrowed her eyes at him.

“I haven’t been myself for a long time,” he said.

“You were...like that? Feral?” she asked.

His mouth twisted a little, sardonic. “For months, I think. Or was it years? Hard to say. Time passes differently, for wolves. You know what they say, about dog years.”

“Are you...are you insane?”

“That,” he said, “is an interesting question. Not as insane as I was, not as sane as I could be.”

Lydia almost laughed. “Perfect. You’re a complete lunatic.”

“Interesting phraseology there. Lunatic. One of my favorite words. But you know, legally, if I am insane, I can’t be held accountable for my actions. For biting you.”

Lydia fell back so she was lying on the floor, facing the ceiling. She was lightheaded from hunger. “Accountable or not,” she said, “You’re in here. So I guess you’re being punished.”

The man lay down next to her on the concrete, his face uncomfortably close to hers. When he was a dumb wolf, it hadn’t bothered her when he touched her, licked her. Now his closeness felt calculated, even if it did alleviate the cold. His voice gave her shivers that had nothing to do with the freezing concrete. “If this is my punishment for turning you, why are you here? What are you being punished for, Lydia Martin?”

She turned away from him.

“Do you know why my bite didn’t turn you?” he continued.

“I don’t want to,” she whispered, but he didn’t listen to her, even as she felt her eyes grow hot and wet.

“Well, that’s the funny thing. It _did_ turn you. Maybe not into anything like me, but I can smell it on you. Where knives and burns and poisons couldn’t show the humans anything, I can smell the magic on you.” He leaned into her shoulder and inhaled deeply.

“Please stop talking,” she said, trying not to sound as if she was begging.

“But it’s been so long since since I could speak. And here I am with a captive audience.”

She tried a barb. “I liked you better as an animal.”

He snorted, as if he knew exactly what she was doing. “But I wasn’t an animal, not really. I’m every bit as much a man as I am an animal, always. How else could I have spent all these long months talking to you inside your head? You’re smart enough to figure that out.”

She sat up on her elbows. “But if you were human, then you were aware when you bit me. So it _is_ your fault.”

“We could spend all day talking in circles around each other,” he said, “And under any other circumstances, I’d enjoy it, but the fact is that you’re dying.”

She sat up, startled, then almost pitched forward as the blood rushed out of her head.

“They’re starving you.”

“I know that, but they’re not -”

“Yes, Lydia, yes they are.” He let that sit for a moment, watching her closely. She tried not to give anything away on her face while her heart sped up and her stomach clenched hard. Then she remembered that he could hear all that anyway, so she let her face crumple and the tears well up. He was there immediately, running his dirty fingers along the wet tracks on her cheeks..

“Shh...don’t worry,” his voice sounded exactly like it did during the experiments, but this wasn’t in her head. He was real, solid and warm and terrifying beside her, “We’ll get you out. I won’t let you die here.”

Lydia could no longer hold back her panic. “Why? Why would you do that for me? Why didn’t you let them kill me? What do you want from me?”

He laughed at her and brought a hand to her shoulder, drawing her to him. She didn’t put up any resistance.

“Hush. When you’ve got what I want, I’ll take it. Until then you’re mine to protect.” The kiss he pressed to her hair burned like a brand, like his mark on her skin.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Turns out writing Pydia banter is incredibly fun oh nooo...  
> Also, thinking of adding a Derek story to this universe. Which is only going to stay this dark, by the way. Abandon all hope of proper consent, ye who enter here.


End file.
